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We propose this 1st Workshop on Definition Extraction as such an exchange forum, with the hope that this workshop could become an academic space to share and assess new methodologies, tools and techniques, in the spirit of promoting the DE as a consolidated research area. This workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss, both theoretical and practical views in DE.

Motivation: Nowadays, the automatic extraction of definitions from textual data is a common task in different domains of Natural Language Processing. Briefly, we can sketch two main research directions:

-The use of Definition Extraction (DE) as a methodological resource in areas such as Computational Semantic, Information Extraction, Text Mining, Ontologies, WEB Semantics or E-Learning. -The conception of DE as a self-challenging task, particularity in Computational Lexicography and Terminology, toward the design and implementation of electronic resources such as lexical knowledge bases, machine- readable dictionaries, terminological databases, thesauri. Such resources can be monolingual or multilingual.

However, in contrast to the generalised use of DE in multiple domains, there is no specific forum for sharing information about methodologies, tools, evaluation techniques or applications related directly with DE.

We propose this 1st Workshop on Definition Extraction as such an exchange forum, with the hope that this workshop could become an academic space to share and assess new methodologies, tools and techniques, in the spirit of promoting the DE as a consolidated research area.

Topics: This workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss, both theoretical and practical views in DE. The following are examples of topics that are relevant, but not exclusive, for the workshop: - Discussions, analysis, positions around the state of art on DE. - Concrete uses of resources obtained from DE in scientific or technical areas. - Original methodologies considering the use of symbolic and/or statistical methods for the recognition and extraction of possible candidates of textual definitions. - Comparisons between DE from structured (such as Wikipedia) and unstructured textual data. - Development of computational tools for extracting definitions from large corpora. - Concrete applications of DE within larger projects in Language Learning, Automated Reasoning, Text Mining, etc. - DE in multilingual environment.

Target Audience: Lexicographers, terminographers, linguists, computational linguists, NLP community and those people interested in DE field.

Paper Submission Process: -Submission process will be independent for RANLP-2009: papers should be submitted to the e-mail address wdeiingen.unam.mx. - However, all submissions should follow RANLP-2009 papers format (no longer than 7 pages, including cover page, figures, tables and references). - We also encourage the submission of demos, which should be no longer than 5 pages. - RANLP-2009 templates could be found in the following link. - Papers will be reviewed using a blind peer review process by at least two members of the program committee. - At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop, and all workshop participants must pay the RANLP-2009 workshop registration fee.

Co-Chairs: Gerardo Sierra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico) Caroline Barrière (Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council of Canada)

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